A fact from Battles of Ramadi (1917) appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 10 June 2015 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:
Did you know... that in the first of the two Battles of Ramadi in 1917, the temperatures—as high as 71°C (160°F)—caused more British casualties than did enemy fire?
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In the top right summary box it says 521 of the 566 casualties were due to the heat, while the body text speaks of 321. I from context guess the second figure is right?
Question about temperature given in article:
The temperature recorded in this article is listed as 160 F. This would make it the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth and would not agree with the highest temp recorded for Iraq in the list of heat records wiki. Should this article or the other be updated?
I thought this might come up. You're thinking of the temperature in the shade, which is how temperatures are usually measured. In this case it was the temperature in direct sunlight - there is no shade in the desert - which is obviously going to be considerably hotter. Prioryman (talk) 20:45, 10 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hello Prioryman, it's still misleading to the reader. If I tell you it was 95° outside today, then it's understood by everyone that I'm talking about the ambient temperature of the air, which is a common frame of reference to understand. If I say that the temperature on the surface of my skin was 105°, no one really knows what that means, since they have no way of conveniently translating that to ambient air temperature. I realize that your point was this happened in the bare desert. But the troops there were presumably clothed for that to deal with that enviroment. I was in the US Army and I spent 6 weeks one summer in Egypt. As someone from the deep south in the USA, I know about hot summers. I was routinely amazed by how comfortable the heat was there, because whereas back home it is very humid, the air in the desert was bone dry, and even when it was 110°, it was more pleasant than back home, where you often become drenched in sweat soaked clothes after being outside. When people read here that it was 160°, they assume that means the air temperature, which it wasn't, and it's misleading. Unfortunately, I don't know how to fix it.
Also, Garrett, you need to press the Shift key to type a tilde (~) in order to auto sign your posts. Don't tell anyone, but I made the same mistake my first time. Cheers.__209.179.13.130 (talk) 02:06, 11 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The article does make it clear that the temperature was measured in the direct sun, where you get the effects of insolation on top of the ambient temperature. Ground temperatures can be much higher (see [1]) and this is of course very relevant to the troops' experience, as they were dug-in and operating from trenches. They were far less well equipped then than their counterparts are now, not least because the mechanisms of heat exhaustion were not understood at the time. Prioryman (talk) 12:10, 11 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
